Mubarak Steps Down From Power - Army to take over...

[erik_blank]

Around 10:00 AM EST President Hosni Mubarak resigned his post in Egypt. NPR reported this here:
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/11/133674...-20110211-1111

Interesting to me is that he handed over the reigns to the Egyptian military instead of his VP, or other person in the civillian government.

Another report by NPR lst week had an interesting note about the Egyptian army and how much it is invested in the housing and development of their countries economy. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/...ome-appliances

All in all, this looks like the whole thing is teetering on the brink of major upheaval. I just hope that the Egyptians can settle this for the best with little to no bloodshed.

[migopod]

I think the usual order of succession in Egypt is that the VP takes over if the president steps down temporarily and the speaker takes over if he steps down permanently. My concern is that they may have just traded an autocratic dictatorship for a military dictatorship. I suppose in a way that's incrementally better, but it seems a bit premature to be jubilant.

From what I've been reading the current situation would be like if the joint chiefs of staff and John Roberts took total control of government, dismissed the entire cabinet and suspended both houses of the legislature. I wonder how well that would go over here.

[OROD]

It's been an interesting few months. My question is, who's next?

[Wizardly]

I hope things are better soon than they were before the end. It's a shame we won't get to see 234 years from now how this history is written.

[Inquartata]

It's been an interesting few months. My question is, who's next?

At least one AP reporter thinks Bahrain, "where opposition groups are calling for street rallies Monday". Another story shows marches shaping up in Algeria for Saturday.

The story I was reading earlier also said that there was an attempt to start protests up in Syria but that it was "snuffed out by security forces". Big shock...

[OROD]

At least one AP reporter thinks Bahrain, "where opposition groups are calling for street rallies Monday". Another story shows marches shaping up in Algeria for Saturday.

The story I was reading earlier also said that there was an attempt to start protests up in Syria but that it was "snuffed out by security forces". Big shock...

Iranians need to take the hint.

I also have this fantasy that Cubans will see what's happening around the world and start going to the streets. Somehow I just dont see that happening, unfortunately. =( Unlike many of these countries, Cuba would benefit most quickly from regime change and going democratic. Even without official U.S. aid, there's hundreds of thousands of Cubans 90 miles away that would be willing to help the very next day.

[erik_blank]

One of the reasons that I think this particular 'regeim change' will work is that the people that were actually in charge are still in charge now. When I first heard the piece in my 2nd link above, it all made sense to me. The military and the 'capitalists' of the Egyptian government are one and the same, and the fact that one political party or the other is nominally in charge doesn't really matter as long as the people in power continue to keep their $$$ rolling in. I thought that this quote was particularly revelant:

No one knows for sure how many resort hotels or other businesses in Egypt are run by the military, which controls somewhere between 5 percent and 40 percent of the nation's economy, according to various estimates. Whatever the number, Springborg says, officers in the Egyptian military are making "billions and billions and billions" of dollars.

These billions would be threatened if the protests devolved into full-on civil conflict. People in the middle of violent political chaos don't buy dishwashers.

"The military wants stability above all," Springborg says. "It's not focused on war fighting; it's focused on consumption."

[Purple Fencer]

A revolution like this only succeeds when the military stays out, which is what happened. Had the Egyptian military stepped in on Mubarak's side, it would've been ugly....and he'd still be in power.

[erik_blank]

But the point here is that the military essentially stepped in on 'their' side... That being the economic side in which they are so deeply ingrained.

[Inquartata]

If the news reports of Mubarak's wealth are correct, he is by far the richest billionaire in the world, and could probably have bought and sold every general and 'captalist' in Egypt several times over. They will be taking pay cuts without him.

I think it probably had more to do with the fact that he is old and was probably half-ready to retire already.

[OROD]

Iranians need to take the hint.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71D1RT20110214

.

[erik_blank]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71D1RT20110214

.

Loved this part at the end of the article:

The Iranian authorities accuse opposition leaders of being part of a Western plot to overthrow the Islamic system.

Must have come from the Glenn Beck of the Iranian government.

[Inquartata]

You'll have to narrow that down a bit more.

[OROD]

It's been an interesting few months. My question is, who's next?

I'd like to change my question, considering what's happening in Bahrain, Iran, and Libya. My new question is, who isn't next?

.

[Inquartata]

Israel.

[OROD]

Indeed.

.

[OROD]

In other news, all Hell's breaking loose in Libya.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71K3X020110221

[Purple Fencer]

Haven't seen much happening in Saudi yet....but at the rate it's going, I don't think it'll be long.

It would be interesting to see what happens if the Saudi royals are booted....their main claim to power hasn't been the oil wealth, it's been that they're the guardians of Mecca and Medina....the 2 holiest places in Islam....so a real test of a new government woudn't be using the oil wealth to actually improve the lot of the people, it'd be handling the crush of the hadj.

[dcmdale]

Interesting OP-ED in today's WSJ on the relationship between Obama's economic policies, hungry people in the developing world, and the unrest. I would have posted this under "The Elections" where we discussed how Fed policy was creating a food crisis, but that thread is closed.

The Wall Street Journal
Op-Ed: The Federal Reserve Is Causing Turmoil Abroad

By George Melloan
23 February 2011
(Copyright (c) 2011, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

In accounts of the political unrest sweeping through the Middle East, one factor, inflation, deserves more attention. Nothing can be more demoralizing to people at the low end of the income scale -- where great masses in that region reside -- than increases in the cost of basic necessities like food and fuel. It brings them out into the streets to protest government policies, especially in places where mass protests are the only means available to shake the existing power structure.

The consumer-price index in Egypt rose to more than 18% annually in 2009 from 5% in 2006, a more normal year. In Iran, the rate went to 25% in 2009 from 13% in 2006. In both cases the rate subsided in 2010 but remained in double digits.

Egyptians were able to overthrow the dictatorial Hosni Mubarak. Their efforts to fashion a more responsive regime may or may not succeed. Iranians are taking far greater risks in tackling the vicious Revolutionary Guards to try to unseat the ruling ayatollahs.

Probably few of the protesters in the streets connect their economic travail to Washington. But central bankers do. They complain, most recently at last week's G-20 meeting in Paris, that the U.S. is exporting inflation.

China and India blame the U.S. Federal Reserve for their difficulties in maintaining stable prices. The International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, always responsive to the complaints of developing nations, are suggesting alternatives to the dollar as the pre-eminent international currency. The IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has proposed replacement of the dollar with IMF special drawing rights, or SDRs, a unit of account fashioned from a basket of currencies that is made available to the foreign currency reserves of central banks.

About the only one failing to acknowledge a problem seems to be the man most responsible, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In a recent question-and-answer session at the National Press Club in Washington, the chairman said it was "unfair" to accuse the Fed of exporting inflation. Other nations, he said, have the same tools the Fed has for controlling inflation.

Well, not quite. Consider, for example, that much of world trade, particularly in basic commodities like food grains and oil, is denominated in U.S. dollars. When the Fed floods the world with dollars, the dollar price of commodities goes up, and this affects market prices generally, particularly in poor countries that are heavily import-dependent. Export-dependent nations like China try to maintain exchange-rate stability by inflating their own currencies to buy up dollars.

Mr. Bernanke has made it clear that his policy is to inflate the money supply. His second round of quantitative easing -- the controversial QE2 policy to systematically purchase $600 billion in Treasury securities with newly created money -- serves that aim. But even for the U.S. it is uncertain that Mr. Bernanke can hold to his 2% inflation target. Oil is going up. Foodstuffs are going up. And when the Fed sneezes money, the weak economies of the world, and the poor masses who are highly vulnerable to price rises in the necessities of life, catch pneumonia.

The turmoil in Iran is reminiscent of another period when the Fed was on an inflationary binge, the late 1970s. The Iranian oil boom had brought many thousands of peasants out of the villages into the cash economy in population centers like Tehran. On top of the disorientation resulting from that change itself, Iranians were then victims of an outbreak of inflation and a sharp decline in the purchasing power of the rials in their pay envelopes. Confused and angry, they supported the clerical revolution that unseated the shah and has been a thorn in America's side ever since.

Today's Iranian revolt has similar causes and, if successful, could be the flip side of 1979, a nation again friendlier toward the U.S. But there is no guarantee of that, or that states now friendly, like Bahrain, will remain so after an Egyptian-style upheaval.

Indeed, it is unlikely that Americans themselves will escape the inflationary consequences of current Fed policy. Aside from the rise in oil and foodstuffs, higher prices of manufactured goods are in the offing. China's inflation rate is hovering at 5%. MKM Partners, a research and trading firm, last November reported that an internal study at Wal-Mart, a big importer from China, showed that the huge retail chain's prices are edging up at an annual rate of 4% a year. That recent trend showed up in last week's consumer-price index report.

The Fed is financing a vast and rising federal deficit, following a practice that has been a surefire prescription for domestic inflation from time immemorial. Meanwhile, its policies are stoking a rise in prices that is contributing to political unrest that in some cases might be beneficial but in others might turn out as badly as the overthrow of the shah in 1979. Does any of this suggest that there might be some urgency to bringing the Fed under closer scrutiny?

[Inquartata]

It suggests to me bringing the deficits under control...blaming the Fed is IMO a magician's misdirection trick. "The problem is not that the drunken sailor spends too extravagantly, it's that his bank's ATM daily withdrawal limits are too high!"